WhatsApp Cofounder on Twitter: It’s Time to #DeleteFacebook

First Snapchat, now Facebook? Amid criticism from users and tumbling stock, a new opponent has appeared: Brian Acton, a cofounder of messaging service WhatsApp (who made billions off of its sale to Facebook), has posted that it is time to delete the ubiquitous app from our lives, a message he delivered using the trending #DeleteFacebook hashtag in a tweet. In the wake of a huge data breach, revealed by reports that Cambridge Analytica (a Steve Bannon–funded political research firm that did work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign) harvested data from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission, Acton might be the most high-profile critic of the social media platform so far—and someone very connected to Facebook’s success.

Acton has a reason to position himself as a privacy advocate: He has helped fund the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit associated with Signal, which provides encrypted messaging services used by journalists and whistle-blowers (Edward Snowden is a fan). But Acton also made a fortune off of the $19 billion sale of WhatsApp to Mark Zuckerberg in 2014, arguably adding to the platform’s domination.

Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg had initially remained silent on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it was revealed that the company allowed data from millions of users to be shared for “academic purposes,” which was then used for “psychographic” profiling intended to help target voters in the 2016 presidential election, among others. Some U.S. senators have called for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress about the breach.

​The Facebook founder’s newest headache is only the latest in a string of damning revelations about the platform since Donald Trump won the election, including reports that Russian infiltrators relied on Facebook to sow discord. ​Since Kylie Jenner sent Snapchat’s stock plummeting a few weeks ago, followed by Rihanna, Zuckerberg might be praying that neither one of them has any feelings about their Facebook profiles.

Update: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded to criticisms for the first time in a post on the platform on Wednesday. In addition to laying out a timeline of events leading up to the data breach, he said, "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."